I
recently sailed to Sucia Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. A
pretty place, it is well worth a visit and a stroll along its paths. And,
because it was March, there were almost no other visitors — quite a contrast
to summertime, when the anchorages are crowded with boats.
After some hours watching a bald eagle soaring along a cliff, I hiked back to
where I had dragged my dinghy onto the beach. As I prepared to launch, I
spotted something peculiar offshore — something tilted, maybe a knocked-over
reef marker. Then it came to me that instead of something small, close by, I
might be looking at something bigger at a greater distance.
I grabbed my binoculars, and sure enough, it
was
a reef marker — a 32-foot, eight ton warning to other boats — stay away from
here! A Canadian sailboat had passed too close to an offshore reef and gone
aground, and had become progressively more stuck for 2 1/2 hours as the tide
fell.
I had just bought a new inflatable dinghy and equipped it with a five
horsepower outboard — I decided I could at least transport the skipper to the
island before nightfall. I motored out to the reef and offered assistance (and
took the picture above).
Then, while looking over the situation, I realized I had a chance to get the
boat off the reef, just with my dinghy. After explaining my plan, I asked the
skipper to pass me a line attached to the top of his mast (a halyard), plus
some more line, so the total length would be several times the height of the
mast. I wanted a long line for several reasons:
If the line was too short, I and my dinghy would be plucked out of the water
when the boat righted itself.
With a long line, the dinghy would be making a nearly horizontal pull — the
most efficient arrangement.
A long line would allow me to develop some speed before the line became taut.
And what was I thinking? I realized I could rotate the boat by pulling on the
top of the mast, just as the wind does in normal sailing. The top of the mast
is the point of greatest leverage on a sailboat, and a relatively small force
applied there can rotate the entire boat. This idea would work if the keel was
the only part of the boat touching the rocks. I would use the dinghy to pull
the mast, the boat would rotate further, the keel would come off the rock, and
the substantial current (see the current in the above picture, right lower
center) would draw the boat away from the reef.
If, on the other hand, I broke the line, the broken end would wrap around my
outboard prop and I would drift away in that same current, into a large area of
open water — but I tried not to think about that.
The skipper attached some additional line to his main halyard and passed it to
me, then I added my own 38 foot line, for a total of about 100 feet. I made
some relatively slow runs, to little effect, then I gradually increased the
speed and allowed the line to grow taut abruptly, to take advantage of the
dinghy's momentum. At first I could only turn the boat horizontally against the
rock — I wasn't rotating it off the rock very much. Then I increased the
throttle setting and the run length, coming up to the boat and then racing
away, paying out the line to keep it out of my prop, and letting the line
become taut quickly.
After about eight fast runs, the boat began to move — then it came off the
rock all at once with a great racket as the keel bounced on the reef. Then, as
I expected, the boat became vertical and I was dragged rather quickly toward it
— but the long line kept me in the water. Success!
This method is much like that recommended in sailing textbooks — attach an
anchor to a long line that is, in turn, attached to your halyard, position the
anchor far from the boat, then winch the halyard to rotate the boat off the
reef. But this skipper had no dinghy to set up the anchor, also, because of the
strong current he probably would have lost control of the situation after
coming off the reef. By contrast, with a powered dinghy I could release him
almost immediately after the boat became free.
It was a satisfying rescue, and fairly effortless, at least compared to some of
the "anchor stories" told in my book
"Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor."
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The Boat-on-a-rock Problem
